Sergey Lavrov gave an interview to Russia's Fifth TV Channel

Sergey Lavrov

MOSCOW, September 24. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted to the United States again that terrorists cannot be divided into bad and good. The country’s top diplomat said so in an interview with Russian Fifth TV Channel.

“Today when the Islamic State is named as the US archenemy I would like to recall that they are those who became stronger, developed and started receiving massive funding and other material support from abroad in the times of changes in power in Libya and attempts to do the same in Syria, when all means were good,” Lavrov noted.

“Then Americans and Europeans stated that they support fighting these regimes aimed against their own people,” he added, noting that “When we drew their attention to the fact that a large number of extremists and terrorists are fighting on the side of rivals of these regimes, we actually received a reply that ‘this will pass away’ - so, we will topple the regime and then we will deal with these terrorists. But in fact everything was not so.”

“If we are fighting with terrorism this should be done everywhere and always. Terrorists cannot be considered ‘good’, because they help overthrowing a leader whom you do not like personally, though he is elected, legitimate and heads a UN member-state,” the Russian foreign minister said, adding that “And ‘bad’ terrorists are those who kill Americans.”

“As they started to worry - with all tragedy of this situation - only after these disgusting videos of executing American journalists were showed on TV,” the minister said, adding that “This is unacceptable and inhumane. It is necessary to fight against such people at full strength.”

“But why didn’t Americans see this threat before? Because they took the task of combating terrorism with double standards and did not heed to our opinion, when we urged them to pool efforts and to help the very Syrian government jointly with moderate patriotic opposition to create a common front against terrorists who literally flooded Syria,” he added.

They “did not heed” to Russia’s position, Lavrov said. “Now an anti-terrorist coalition is being created. But I will say to you that we have nothing to be ashamed of here,” the foreign minister said, noting that “We have been assisting to Iraq, Syria and other regional countries to build up their potential in the fight against this evil for a long time and without any sanctions.”

Moscow “delivers modern effective weapons to Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Yemen which actually strengthens their capacity to confront terrorism.” “Later is better than never. If other Western countries primarily those having specific resources are ready to help Iraqi legitimate government we just welcome this,” he said, adding that “If they want to fight terrorism on the territory of other countries, particularly Syria, certainly specific governments should agree on this.”

As for Syria, “the leadership of that country stated repeatedly that they are ready to co-operate with foreign partners to resolve the task to root out terrorism in the homeland,” Sergey Lavrov added.